Maintaining your web of acquaintances has become harder and harder. Everyone seems to want to stay in touch in a different way. In high school, you’d all congregate at lunch together at some usual spot in the school. Maybe in college you’d phone each other up a lot on your cells and arrange to meet at a pub or club after classes. I imagine some people still do this, but more and more important as the number of acquaintances grows you have a harder time keeping track of them, and many fall between the cracks. As someone who hates acquaintances, but loves the friends that come from them, these previous systems usually meant I spent enough time with them to form a few real friendships, and let’s face it they didn’t have many choices back then.
So invariably things will end up online. I notice that in the days of MUD/MOO/MUSH/M!@* those were hangout spots that often devolved past whatever game was being played there. Then in the more recent world of online gaming, you’d go in a channel on battle.net — you’d join the same local server, and chat ingame while dead in counter-strike. Eventually you might get more serious, join a clan/guild and talk on IRC, or in guild-chat in-game. When someone gets busy or stops playing, you loose them forever. These days there is always inumerable different messenger services that are incompatible with each other, every site seems to require an account and has a forum, and many people keep protected blogs that frankly stiffen the acquisition of acquaintances, stopping you from getting to know someone casually until you might call them a friend.
I think the ideas of an international forum, where there is only one, and anyone around the world, with a single identity, could discuss anyting, is such a powerful idea. I never got into it, but the days of Usenet are clearly over, with ISPs shutting down their servers left, right and centre, and binaries being the only reason people still go there. I missed the boat on that one, I often wish I hadn’t. I can’t help but think of Demosthenes and cry a little inside at the potential lost.
Related posts:
- Open Worlds I was eyeballing the Penny-Arcade comic Wednesday and it really...
- English mania Crowds of Chinese people chant English phrases out, and in...
Recent Comments